When Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir Eat, Pray, Love was published in 2006, its subtitle—One Woman’s Search for Everything—promised readers insight into a familiar conundrum: how to navigate the elusive ideal of “having it all.” Almost twenty years on, we might ask whether we mistook “more” for “enough.”
Gilbert’s book sparked a surge in yoga classes, retreat-based tourism, and women pledging to prioritise themselves. These women have helped to turn the mind-body-spirit ethos Gilbert popularised into a trillion-dollar industry. What began as a quiet pursuit for “feeling better” has morphed into a competitive, high-maintenance lifestyle that necessitates ever more time, money, and attention.
Contemporary wellness culture often neglects—or outright denies—the reality that women’s identities and authentic wellbeing depend on their relationships with others. That’s why wellness so easily degenerates into egocentrism and poor health. In the absence of meaningful duties to others, self-care turns into the pursuit of a frictionless, slovenly, epicurean lifestyle. Likewise, without a meaningful outlet for the pursuit of excellence, self-optimisation degenerates into self-worship. In excess, both self-care and self-optimisation lead to isolation and sterility.
In short, this vision of “wellness” does not promote women’s authentic wellbeing, because it neglects the value of relationality and other-centered purpose. To truly flourish, women should reject this model and pursue a more enduring vision of happiness.
From Self-Care to Self-Indulgence
For women seeking fulfilment in a modern world, Gilbert’s memoir offered a vision of success that broke away from conventional, male-normative, career-focused expectations. Weaving together therapeutic self-care, uncompromising self-prioritisation, and postmodern self-authorship, Gilbert entreated women to “claim responsibility for your own contentment.”
In retrospect, however, Gilbert’s framework of wellness did not redefine the ideal of the “successful woman.” It just expanded it. Not only do you need to be a devoted mother, a sexy romantic partner, and an ideal worker to be successful. Now you need to practice yoga, meditate regularly, and consume only organic and ethical products, too. What’s more, there is no objective way to measure how “well” you’re doing at this ever-more-demanding pursuit. While “health” may be gauged through biological markers (BMI, blood pressure, cholesterol levels, etc.), “wellness” is strictly self-assessed. It is grounded in a nebulous, internal sense of betterment, satisfaction, or relaxation.
These dangers are subtly foreshadowed in Gilbert’s time in Italy. Having travelled there as part of a year-long journey to heal from a painful divorce and identity crisis, her immersion in sensory gratification demonstrates the potential for self-care to become excessive. What begins as Gilbert consciously rejecting the diet culture that defined the noughties by eating without guilt or restraint soon slips into eating as a way to celebrate herself. She distorts the Italian mindset of savouring each moment (il dolce far niente), spending entire days idly, wandering aimlessly through cityscapes, and luxuriating in her lack of productivity. All the while, she insists that this self-focus should not be mistaken for selfishness:
I did not know yet what I deserved… But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact… And I will leave [Italy] with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world.
Gilbert’s enjoyment of physical pleasures is seen as helping her to define her own identity and helping her become “well” again. But when self-indulgence is allowed to pass for self-care, and feeling well is untethered from health, how do we distinguish between genuine healing and blatant hedonism?
The trouble with “self-care” arises when we conflate occasional self-indulgence with a self-indulgent way of life. The former refers to fleeting pleasures—occasionally even vices—such as a hot bath, a glass of wine, or a cigarette. The latter reflects a cultural glorification of “self-care,” in which, as the journalist Suzy Weiss puts it, “anything you do for yourself is inherently good and you should never feel guilty about it.” Someone who indulges now and then, while recognising it as such, may be considered temperate. In contrast, someone who drives themselves into social isolation, addiction, or obesity under the pretence of “self-care” clearly exemplifies intemperance.
In an age of unprecedented comfort, the constant encouragement to affirm every indulgence has had a particularly sinister effect on women, who are disproportionately affected and targeted by the wellness industry’s messaging. Even with the ability to live in comfort—at any size, in any state, with every conceivable convenience and pleasure only a screen tap away—many women remain spiritually impoverished, unconvinced of their own beauty, goodness, and worth.
Selfish Optimisation
After Italy, Gilbert travels to an ashram in India. There, she takes a vow of silence, scrubs floors, and meditates for hours in a quest to accept herself and develop spiritual discipline. After finding inner peace, she determines that it was only possible as a consequence of personal effort. According to Gilbert, happiness requires you to “participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings.” Self-optimisation is reframed as not only as permissible but necessary for female happiness.
It may seem counterintuitive that Gilbert’s abstemiousness could be commodified, yet many now invest great sums in expensive wellness practices and products that borrow the language of asceticism (clean, filtered, detoxed), while relying upon the very consumption they claim to transcend. What was previously a spiritual rite of renunciation becomes a lifestyle of constant acquisition. For if self-prioritisation is the way to happiness and success, then it’s surely worth investing in. Enter the market, which creates a mandate to spend ever more in the pursuit of wellness. A sound bath, for instance, is no longer just an optional experience; it is an “investment in well-being.” To truly care for yourself, you must spend. Or, instead of relaxing, you might spend to sufferTM: Barry’s Bootcamp—a gym specialising in punishing workout classes—promises to bring you “Down to hell so you look like heaven.”
When this pursuit exceeds moderation—whether through effort or expense—it leads to a new kind of imbalance: over-optimisation to the point of deterioration. Without objective standards to determine wellness, there is no check against the market’s tendency to transform practices and products from optional self-care to mandatory, performative optimisation. Your body and behaviour become both the target of transformation and the product to be remade. If this leaves little time for anyone but yourself, well, that’s just the nature of self-improvement: the price of purity is a life devoted to the self. In this way, the market secularises and materialises Gilbert’s spiritual journey.
Such naked materialism strikes me as a markedly left-hemispheric outlook on being “well.” As described by the British philosopher and psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist, the hemisphere hypothesis portrays the left-hemisphere (LH) as self-interested, detailed-focused and attending to tools and resources that we need, whereas the right hemisphere is broad, global, intuitive and connects to the bigger picture. One hemisphere utilises the world, the other understands it. Accordingly, rather than exploring how we feel in our very being, the LH wants to reduce things down to ingredients: what steps can deliver the outcome we want? This reductionist mindset is visible in today’s booming biohacking trends, such as red-light therapy, Oura rings, and morning routines.
Yet this mechanistic pursuit of wellness inhibits the very incorporation of the body and mind wellness culture promises. The more self-optimisers retreat into the individualism demanded by a “well” life, the more they risk unravelling. Ultimately, the excessive pursuit of self-optimisation, whether through consumption or asceticism, becomes a self-consuming cycle that leads to exhaustion, isolation, and fragmentation.
Rediscovering Female Equilibrium
In Indonesia, Gilbert has her final epiphany: this time (!), the answer is “balance.” By blending Western comfort with Eastern spirituality—integrating self-care with self-optimisation—she rediscovers Aristotle’s “Golden Mean,” the virtue of finding moderation between extremes.
Despite this well-intentioned coda, the wellness culture Gilbert inspired continues to fuel excess overmoderation. This is because when you make self-definition the modern feminist project, you remove the tempering influence of external assessment. Traditional paths of female fulfilment (family, community) are discarded, and biological continuity is supplanted by the pursuit of personal legacy.
Gilbert’s message of self-authored happiness and success suggests that, more than being seen as beautiful, truthful, or good, women want to be perceived as powerful. So powerful, in fact, that they can create their own reality. When Oprah Winfrey asked Gilbert for a guide to self-realisation, she suggested beginning each day with the question, “What do I really, really, really want?” Gilbert’s call for women to construct their identity autonomously may sound liberatory, but taken to its logical conclusion, it risks becoming a form of loss. It incites the abandonment of traditional relations that once offered direction and purpose, such as those of wife, mother, and caretaker. Instead of inheriting moral and spiritual values from a coherent framework, you are encouraged to pick and choose from a cultural buffet.
In Aristotelian terms, Gilbert is concerned primarily with material causes (her body, emotions and environment) and formal causes (cultural ideas or constructs) that shape her understanding of happiness and identity. She neglects the efficient cause (tradition, relationships, education) and completely ignores the final cause, the telos, of what it means to live well. Instead of developing the potential for virtue through temperance, prudence, social connection, and motherhood, Gilbert’s model of autonomy presents a static, prematurely complete self. Without a telos, what seems like freedom is ultimately a dead end, a project lacking higher purpose or true fulfilment.
For an increasing number of women, choosing such autonomy leads to literal sterilisation. The stated grounds for this choice are manifold, from environmentalism, opposition to traditional structures, or simple lack of desire for children. Yet, as Aristotle again would tell us, true freedom lies not in the denial of one’s nature, but in the disciplined cultivation of it. Radical autonomy does not promote virtue or lead to human flourishing but retreats instead into a vision of the self as untethered and inviolable. It also reveals a serious lack of foresight. What happens if women no longer feel empowered by their childlessness? Or if their marriages break down? Such profound self-exclusion from the reality of embodied living is akin to staring into the void. And with no biological continuity or virtuous developments to absorb that gaze, the void simply stares back.
True autonomy is not simply the freedom to choose, but the cultivation of the capacity to choose well. The character of Liz Gilbert—witty, introspective, and fiercely independent—resonated with millions of women because she gave voice to a question so many were asking themselves: how does one redefine a life outside the expectations of marriage and conventional success? But when you attend to solely materialistic or mechanical tools for obtaining success, you are only recognising power as a value, and you will have no sense of the good, the beautiful and the true. Consequently, the transcendence promised by radical self-optimisation or excessive self-care grants not fulfilment but dissatisfaction.
Both self-care and self-optimisation have value and a rightful place, and it is perfectly valid to speak of your inner state as distinct from physical health. The real danger for women lies in the belief that unless you fully subscribe to the self-authored mode of wellness, you are somehow “unwell.” We need a recalibrated understanding of wellness—one that encourages moderation, sees through passing trends and emphasises the development of potential and purpose as enduring virtues. This would allow for a sensible level of self-regard and enable women to set boundaries, foster growth, and engage in relationships without dependency or martyrdom.
Ultimately, wellness is not found in the pursuit of self-centered extremes, carried out in isolation. Rather, it arises from the deliberate tending of deep relationships built on mutual duty and care, the disciplined cultivation of one’s capacity for excellence, and a humble recognition of the limits that make us human.
